Related papers: Maximum likelihood and the single receptor
Many eukaryotic cells are able to sense chemical gradients by directly measuring spatial concentration differences. The precision of such gradient sensing is limited by fluctuations in the binding of diffusing particles to specific…
Cells use surface receptors to estimate the concentration of external ligands. Limits on the accuracy of such estimations have been well studied for pairs of ligand and receptor species. However, the environment typically contains many…
The physical limit with which a cell senses external ligand concentration corresponds to the perfect absorber, where all ligand particles are absorbed and overcounting of same ligand particles does not occur. Here we analyze how the lateral…
Eukaryotic cells are able to sense chemical gradients in a wide range of environments. We show that, if a cell is exposed to a highly variable environment, it may gain chemotactic accuracy by expressing multiple receptor types with varying…
Metastatic cancer cells detect the direction of lymphatic flow by self-communication: they secrete and detect a chemical which, due to the flow, returns to the cell surface anisotropically. The secretion rate is low, meaning detection noise…
We consider a molecular communication system comprised of a transmitter, an absorbing receiver, and an interference source. Assuming amplitude modulation, we analyze the dependence of the bit error rate (BER) on the detection interval,…
Cells often have tens of thousands of receptors, even though only a few activated receptors can trigger full cellular responses. Reasons for the overabundance of receptors remain unclear. We suggest that, in certain conditions, the large…
Physical limit of molecular sensing has been extensively studied in biological systems. Biosensors are engineered equivalents of molecular sensors in living systems and play critical role in disease diagnosis and management. Investigation…
Biological cells are often found to sense their chemical environment near the single-molecule detection limit. Surprisingly, this precision is higher than simple estimates of the fundamental physical limit, hinting towards active sensing…
Chemotactic cells of eukaryotic organisms are able to accurately sense shallow chemical concentration gradients using cell-surface receptors. This sensing ability is remarkable as cells must be able to spatially resolve small fractional…
In order to survive, reproduce and (in multicellular organisms) differentiate, cells must control the concentrations of the myriad different proteins that are encoded in the genome. The precision of this control is limited by the inevitable…
Many types of cells can sense external ligand concentrations with cell-surface receptors at extremely high accuracy. Interestingly, ligand-bound receptors are often internalized, a process also known as receptor-mediated endocytosis. While…
A diffusion-based molecular communication system has two major components: the diffusion in the medium, and the ligand-reception. Information bits, encoded in the time variations of the concentration of molecules, are conveyed to the…
We investigate single-cell directional sensing from diffusing chemoattractant signals released by a localized source. We focus on the low-concentration regime in which receptor activity is discrete and cellular decisions are made on…
In this paper, diffusion-based molecular commu- nication with ligand receptor receivers is studied. Information messages are assumed to be encoded via variations of the con- centration of molecules. The randomness in the ligand reception…
Many crucial biological processes operate with surprisingly small numbers of molecules, and there is renewed interest in analyzing the impact of noise associated with these small numbers. Twenty--five years ago, Berg and Purcell showed that…
This paper studies distance estimation for diffusive molecular communication. The Cramer-Rao lower bound on the variance of the distance estimation error is derived. The lower bound is derived for a physically unbounded environment with…
Cells in natural environments like tissue or soil sense and respond to extracellular ligands with intricately structured and non-monotonic spatial distributions that are sculpted by processes such as fluid flow and substrate adhesion.…
Biological cells estimate concentration gradients of signaling molecules with a precision that is limited not only by sensing noise, but additionally by the cell's own stochastic motion. We ask for the theoretical limits of gradient…
Living cells use readout molecules to record the state of receptor proteins, similar to measurements or copies in typical computational devices. But is this analogy rigorous? Can cells be optimally efficient, and if not, why? We show that,…